Redevelopment of Exit 32 includes store

A Marshall County man plans to develop his land in the southeast quadrant of Exit 32 on Interstate 65 with a convenience store.

"We're wanting to get a new building put up," Wayne Wright of Globe Road said Wednesday, "but we're sort of at a standstill until the road is finished."

Civil Constructors of Franklin has the contract from the Tennessee Department of Transportation to widen Mooresville Highway, State Route 373. Road widening took some of the land for what was Williams store, a business that rented a building at Exit 32 from Larry Beatle of Nashville, Wright said.

"I owned the land next to what Beatle owned, and after the state came through, he didn't have enough land to do what he wanted, so I bought him out," Wright said.

He's consulted with John Chunn, owner of Truette Construction on East Commerce Street and the two men were at the most recent meeting of the city's Planning Commission. That panel advocates annexation of the land Wright has owned so he will have a larger lot for a new store.

"The extra property that joins where the store was," Wright said.

Planning commissioners have also seen Wright's site plans as worthwhile, so by the time the city council adopts the annexation ordinance on three votes - the process normally takes three months - Wright might have an agreement with a fuel supplier.

"I've been talking with Bill Parson's oil company of Fayetteville," Wright said. "We'll build him a building and he'll run a Shell there."

The convenience store might be compared to the Shell station at the intersection of Ellington Parkway and Nashville Highway near the Walgreen Pharmacy.

Wright plans to enhance the property with picnic tables and places for travelers to walk their dogs.

"Maybe, if we're lucky enough, we'll get a motel on the hill," Wright said. "But right now, we're just concentrating on the filling station."

Wright currently runs his own boring business to provide a way to extend pipes under roads.

"I've been around construction for a number of years and at any widening jobs," he said, "come back in three or four years and you'll see a big change.

As for the widening project now, Wright said, "It's inconvenient now, but it will be good when they get through with it."